EverythingScience

Your Spinal Cord Can Learn And Recall Without Brain Input And We Finally Know How
Devoid of a head, many insects will continue to kick and twitch until at last, drained of all life, their movements grind to a complete stop.

Scientists have known for some time that the spinal cord is capable of executing limb movements beyond reflex jerking motions, even to the point of adapting to avoid unpleasant stimulations.

Just how its neurons 'learn' new responses without the brain's say-so has never been clear.

A study on transgenic mice conducted by researchers from the VIB-Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders in Belgium has discovered the role of a specific gene expressed in spinal nerves in memorizing responses to potential threats.

NASA’s Dragonfly Rotorcraft Mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan Confirmed
NASA has confirmed its Dragonfly rotorcraft mission to Saturn’s organic-rich moon Titan. The decision allows the mission to progress to completion of final design, followed by the construction and testing of the entire spacecraft and science instruments.

Dragonfly is confirmed with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date of July 2028. This reflects a cost increase of about two times the proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from when the mission was originally selected in 2019.

To compensate for the delayed arrival at Titan, NASA also provided additional funding for a heavy-lift launch vehicle to shorten the mission’s cruise phase.

The rotorcraft, targeted to arrive at Titan in 2034, will fly to dozens of promising locations on the moon, looking for prebiotic chemical processes common on both Titan and the early Earth before life developed. Dragonfly marks the first time NASA will fly a vehicle for science on another planetary body. The rotorcraft has eight rotors and flies like a large drone.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye … for Now
Engineers working on NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter assembled for one last time in a control room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Tuesday, April 16, to monitor a transmission from the history-making helicopter. While the mission ended Jan. 25, the rotorcraft has remained in communication with the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover, which serves as a base station for Ingenuity. This transmission, received through the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network, marked the final time the mission team would be working together on Ingenuity operations.

Now the helicopter is ready for its final act: to serve as a stationary testbed, collecting data that could benefit future explorers of the Red Planet.

"With apologies to Dylan Thomas, Ingenuity will not be going gently into that good Martian night,” said Josh Anderson, Ingenuity team lead at JPL. “It is almost unbelievable that after over 1,000 Martian days on the surface, 72 flights, and one rough landing, she still has something to give. And thanks to the dedication of this amazing team, not only did Ingenuity overachieve beyond our wildest dreams, but also it may teach us new lessons in the years to come.”

Originally designed as a short-lived technology demonstration mission that would perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, the first aircraft on another world operated from the Martian surface for almost three years, flew more than 14 times farther than the distance expected, and logged more than two hours of total flight time.

Ingenuity’s mission ended after the helicopter experienced a hard landing on its last flight, significantly damaging its rotor blades. Unable to fly, the rotorcraft will remain at “Valinor Hills” while the Perseverance rover drives out of communications range as it continues to explore the western limb of Jezero Crater...

Crucial connection for 'quantum internet' made for the first time
Researchers have produced, stored, and retrieved quantum information for the first time, a critical step in quantum networking.

The ability to share quantum information is crucial for developing quantum networks for distributed computing and secure communication. Quantum computing will be useful for solving some important types of problems, such as optimizing financial risk, decrypting data, designing molecules, and studying the properties of materials.

However, this development is being held up because quantum information can be lost when transmitted over long distances. One way to overcome this barrier is to divide the network into smaller segments and link them all up with a shared quantum state.

To do this requires a means to store the quantum information and retrieve it again: that is, a quantum memory device. This must 'talk' to another device that allows the creation of quantum information in the first place.

For the first time, researchers have created such a system that interfaces these two key components and uses regular optical fibers to transmit the quantum data.

4.5 million gamers around the world have advanced medical science by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories using a minigame included inside the critically and commercially successful video game Borderlands 3. Their playing has led to a significantly refined estimate of the relationships of microbes in the human gut.

The results of this collaboration will both substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in the future.

By playing Borderlands Science, a mini-game within the looter-shooter video game Borderlands 3, these players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health.

This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles that represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet.

Researchers at the University of Iowa in a new study have linked a region in the brain to how humans redirect thoughts and attention when distracted. The connection is important because it offers insights into cognitive and behavioral side effects to a technique being used to treat patients with Parkinson's disease.

The subthalamic nucleus is a pea-sized brain region involved in the motor-control system, meaning our movements. In people with Parkinson's disease, those movements have been compromised: Researchers believe the subthalamic nucleus, which normally acts as a brake on sudden movement, is exerting too much influence. That overactive brake, researchers think, is what contributes to the tremors and other motor deficiencies associated with the disease.

NASA bit off more than it could chew when it sent the Perseverance rover to Mars to collect samples.

The US$2.4 billion mission landed the rover in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake. It's the ideal spot to search for the fossils of Martian microbes that may have existed when the planet was lush with lakes and rivers.

Perseverance's main mission is to collect samples of the rock and sediment along the lake bed and the crater rim, in hopes of finding a sign that life once thrived on the red planet. The rover has done a fine job – so far it's secured 24 samples – but NASA no longer knows how it's going to bring them to Earth for analysis.

NASA's original design for the retrieval mission, called Mars Sample Return, has fallen apart. The agency is asking companies to step in and propose better ideas.

Before the dawn of the space age, it was difficult to gauge the feasibility of life beyond Earth. Was Earth the sole harbor of life, or did intelligent beings permeate the heavens? The impenetrable clouds of Venus, indistinct shadings on Mars, and imagined structures on the Moon allowed scientists and science fiction authors alike to populate the Solar System with cosmic neighbors.

We're about to find out what's happening with NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission. In just a few hours – at 17:00 UTC / 13:00 EDT – NASA is going to host a media teleconference that sets out its recommendations for moving forward.

The mission has been ongoing for several years, with the deployment of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. Part of Perseverance's mission is to gather interesting samples of Martian rock to be collected by another mission and returned to Earth.

Last year, the future of the Mars sample return mission became shaky after an independent review determined that the program had "unrealistic budget and schedule expectations", an "unwieldy structure" and was "not arranged to be led effectively".

Once a particle of matter, always a particle of matter. Or not. Thanks to a quirk of quantum physics, four known particles made up of two different quarks—such as the electrically neutral D meson composed of a charm quark and an up antiquark—can spontaneously oscillate into their antimatter partners and vice versa.

At a seminar held March 26 at CERN, the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented the results of its latest search for matter–antimatter asymmetry in the oscillation of the neutral D meson, which, if found, could help shed light on the mysterious matter–antimatter imbalance in the universe.

A fleeting visit of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Venus has revealed surprising insights into how gases are stripped away from the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere.

Detections in a previously unexplored region of Venus's magnetic environment show that carbon and oxygen are being accelerated to speeds where they can escape the planet's gravitational pull.

Lina Hadid, CNRS researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory (LPP) and lead author of the study said, "This is the first time that positively charged carbon ions have been observed escaping from Venus's atmosphere. These are heavy ions that are usually slow moving, so we are still trying to understand the mechanisms that are at play. It may be that an electrostatic 'wind' is lifting them away from the planet, or they could be accelerated through centrifugal processes."

The magnetic field surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has been observed for the first time. Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have been surprised by the orderly nature of the field, which exists in the extremely violent environment surrounding the black hole Sagittarius A*. The study could lead to a better understanding of the crucial role that the magnetic field plays in how the black hole feeds on surrounding matter.

This is the second time that the EHT has observed the magnetic field of a supermassive black hole. In 2021 it detected the field of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

Supermassive black holes are believed to be surrounded by plasma that is swirling into the gravitational abyss. This creates a powerful magnetic field, which can then interact with the infalling material. This accelerating material emits copious amounts of radiation including radio waves that are polarized by the local magnetic field.

Europe's climate monitor said Tuesday that March was the hottest on record and the tenth straight month of historic heat, with sea surface temperatures also hitting a "shocking" new high.

Sailing through space might sound like something out of science fiction, but the concept is no longer limited to books or the big screen. In April, a next-generation solar sail technology – known as the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System – will launch aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand. The technology could advance future space travel and expand our understanding of our Sun and solar system.

Solar sails use the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, angling toward or away from the Sun so that photons bounce off the reflective sail to push a spacecraft. This eliminates heavy propulsion systems and could enable longer duration and lower-cost missions. Although mass is reduced, solar sails have been limited by the material and structure of the booms, which act much like a sailboat’s mast. But NASA is about to change the sailing game for the future.

The first technique capable of measuring the pull of gravity on a particle just microns in diameter could aid the quest for a quantum theory of gravity – a longstanding goal in physics. The new experiment uses a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to detect the force on the particle at ultralow temperatures and suppresses vibrations that might interfere with motion due to gravity.

Gravity differs from the other fundamental forces because it describes a curvature in space-time rather than straightforward interactions between objects. This difference explains, in part, why theoretical physicists have long struggled to reconcile gravity (as described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity) with quantum mechanics. One of the main sticking points is that while the latter assumes space-time is fixed, the former states that it changes in the presence of massive objects. Since experiments to determine which description is correct are extremely difficult to perform, a theory of quantum gravity remains out of reach despite much theoretical effort in areas such as string theory and loop quantum gravity.